Logo Competition

Hey - like your logo!

It was very hard to narrow down the entries to only the top 10 - what we think of as the best may not always appeal to the readers. Maybe we should have a second round...?

Chris Maunder

dev-archive - the website for developers
http://www.dev-archive.com

Chris and People:

I have many years of experience in Logo designs and have some suggestions for you contest...

1) Logos are always best done when there is interaction between the designer(s) and the company involved.

2) Logos are almost always done with a very large description of the intent of the company to work from. In this case, there was no such description amd what we ended up with were a bunch of logos with many good ideas, but without a guiding principle. For example, if I knew that the logo had to be "serious", I would have done mine diferently. If the logo had to be reproduceable in black and white, then Dan's logo may have to be changed so that the "G" would reproduce better (given his shadow effect).

Here are some possible options to get things back on track:

1) Take the top 3 and let them submit a second logo for a second vote. This will make up for the problem of none of us having a good description of what is wanted by the "company" "code guru".

2) Give the top 3 a very detailed description to work from. This will eliminate "guessing" or going off on the wrong track with a good idea.
Include: word requirements, aethestic requirements, and practical requirements like reproduction.

3) Forget the space restriction. I believe your designs will be much better if you don't put it into a pigeon hole of a particular size. It really ain't that hard guys to change the size on all the webpages for goodness sakes! ;-)

These just friendly suggestions and I don't mean to suggest anything here to benefit myself. I am happy to even be a finalist and think the current winning design (Dan obviously has won) is clean, neat and serious and applaud his compositional skills. My experience tells me you will have a heck of a time making T-Shirts, ball-caps, and black and white letter heads and business cards, but perhaps that is not your aim.

Sincerely,

-David de Hilster

Black and white logos are not the ONLY form. But they CAN be required by a company when one makes a logo. Of course it can be in color, but many times it must look good in black and white.

-David de Hilster

David,

Your suggestions are noteworthy. However, I personally feel that we shouldn't take this competition too over-seriously. No doubt designing is a serious matter, I feel that dev-archive is a place of get-togethers for learning, sharing and having fun together. Let's try not to take away too much of the fun and make this whole event too serious. Afterall, I think they'll change another logo/web again at a later stage. They've changed it before and changes are normally good and refreshing.

You have a great logo. Let no one take that away from you. My logo turnout was just a fluke of luck. If I had another vote, your's will be the next I would place on.

Agreed, printing my logo on shirts and caps could be a problem (considering the amount of grayshades and color involved), but could be easily overcomed by a modified logo specially designed for printing, with the theme of the logo still intact.

It's been nice knowing you thru' this friendly competition. Oh, and one other thing, my name's not "Dan" but it's "Michael", although my surname (first name) is "Tan". :-)

Michael Tan
vrsurfer@pacific.net.sg
http://home3.pacific.net.sg/~vrsurfer

Thanks for all your suggestions guys.

Choosing the top 10 from the 200+ that we received was difficult, and we realised that what we considered as the top 10 would probably not be what everyone else thought was the top 10. I think the idea of a second round is excellent.

As to logo design considerations, we deliberately did not try and steer the design to far in any direction - we wanted the designers to have free reign and come up with something that they themselves thought would be cool. If we do a second round then we will be more specific on what we want - but really all we need is something that says "dev-archive" and stands out.

Chris Maunder

dev-archive - the website for developers
http://www.dev-archive.com

Agreed. :-)
Ranking the logos could be a better option than voting for one.

The "guru" guy is key in my logo. The type to me is secondary and could be totally redesigned. But of course it is all moot given the fact that I am in a distant second place and will not win unless I discover 3000 long lost de Hilster relatives with email accounts to vote for me! ;-)

I do agree that all the other logos are just word pertubations and don't have anything to do with "Guru".

The only other thing I am amazed at is the steady as a rock percentages that have persisted from 50 votes to 2300 votes. It seems wierd that the percentages have only varied 1% or so. I guess I'm just not good good enough at statistics to understand the steadiness of the curve for such a long period of time! ;-)

It is all subjective in the end and up to the Code Guru folks. They run the show and should have the last say in all this.

-David de Hilster